LETTERS 30.6.18

Take a stand
DROUGHT: the word causes shivers of fear in many Australians, particularly those in the bush.
A 2015 poll found that people were more worried about drought than any other consequence of climate change.
Now farmers are complaining that the big dry means that they are having to “de-stock” or, in plain English, kill thousands of animals even earlier than they would usually be killed.
Meat and Livestock Australia have revised the number of lambs that will be slaughtered this year to 22.85 million, while sheep slaughter is expected to reach 7.8m.
That’s more than 30m animals, most of them little more than babies. Many of these animals will have suffered barbaric treatments such as mulesing, ear-tagging and castration, and will have been repeatedly mutilated during shearing.
The Climate Council has concluded that droughts are likely to worsen in severity and duration in southern Australia if greenhouse gas emissions are not cut deeply and rapidly.
The quickest way to achieve this is to eliminate the wool and sheep meat industries. These businesses add significantly to greenhouse emissions through “enteric fermentation,” or animals belching and passing gas, as well as causing vegetation change and soil erosion and water pollution through faecal contamination and sheep dips.
For the farmers it’s an easy equation: if you can’t feed them, don’t breed them. The rest of us can take a stand for animals, and help to preserve natural ecosystems by not buying woollen garments and not eating baby lambs.Desmond BellamyPETA Australia, Byron Bay

Promises…
LABOR leader Bill Shorten was in Perth recently and again promising voters another $400 million.
Mr Shorten and the Labor party has already stated – regardless of what the productivity commission report recommends – that he and his Labor colleagues will not vote in favour of the change in either house of parliament.
So anything Mr Shorten offers to WA is only an offer.
So the $2 billion offered by Mr Shorten could be somev time in the future.
The voters in upcoming by-elections in Perth and Fremantle need to send a message to both Labor and the Greens that WA will not accept anything less than 80 per cent of our GST allocation.
WA will never get their true allocation of GST because the Labor party and the Greens have already stated they will block any change to the GST that affects other states.
Remember Victoria and NSW do not have to pay GST on their income from the poker machines, which equates to hundreds of millions of dollars each year that WA doesn’t receive.
We should not be fooled by Mr Shorten’s promises, because we know where WA Labor promises have got us in the past.Steven CrudenWitts Lane, Kwinana Town Centre